Lend-Lease Deal Has Navy on Run

In the middle of August, summer of 1986, the United States Navy, which could ill afford it, took a direct hit amidships below the water line and, when last seen, was limping to port, listing badly and sending flares into the night air.

The fleet was under attack by some of the super-dreadnoughts of our day, the mightiest flotilla of them all, the national press. The Washington Post, New York Daily News, New York Times, Howard Cosell, Mike Royko, even the networks, were pouring shot and shell across the Navy’s bow.

The casus belli was the Navy’s decision to dispatch a line officer into civilian life periodically to earn a supplemental living running errands for a private corporation.

You would have thought they were lending him to the Russians. Actually, all they did was lend him to the Los Angeles Raiders, which is not quite the same thing.

The shock effect was instantaneous. This was the kind of thing that led to the fall of the Roman Empire, the decline of manners, and it probably couldn’t be expected to help the Reagan Administration any. It’s the kind of thing you’d blame on the National Rifle Assn. if you’re on one side of the political spectrum, or Rose Bird if you’re on the other.

The Navy of John Paul Jones, Admiral Dewey and Commodore Perry had just struck its colors. No wonder the Aussies won the America’s Cup. We are a nation of landlubbers if the Navy can’t hold its position. If there’s ever another battle of Subic Bay, we’ve had it.

The actual facts were a little less emotional. Napoleon Ardel McCallum is an officer and a gentleman. He’s also a damn fine football player.

You don’t get all that many fine football players at the Naval Academy these days--for a very good reason. Fine football players want to spend their immediate postschool years on the roster of the Green Bay Packers, not the good ship Peleliu. They want to go where they don’t have to study the cosines of angle X and the square root of infinity. They want to go where class attendance is optional, girls are plentiful and the booster club will get you a car to go get ‘em.

Ens. McCallum didn’t set out to be a football player. He was only the fourth-best running back in his own hometown in high school and figured his prospects were limited.

He wanted to be an astronaut, anyway. Failing that, he wanted to be at least a Navy pilot.

For that, the Naval Academy is an excellent springboard.

Plebe McCallum found out two things at Annapolis: (1) he was an excellent football prospect; (2) he was a suspect astronaut prospect.

“It was my eyes,” he said. “I can see 20/20 but I was borderline. You can be 20/20 if you miss three letters on the 20/20 line. But you can’t get into Pensacola (naval flight school) if you miss even one. I missed two.”

He hardly needed a white cane and cup. He could see without glasses, but his prospects for orbiting the earth one day went glimmering. He orbited football fields instead.

Service academies are the trial horses of football. In pugilism, they would be known strictly as opponents. They look good on the record but pose no great problem on the field. They’re usually long on eagerness, short on skilled talent.

Napoleon McCallum brought instant respectability. The Middies beat teams such as Pittsburgh and Virginia. They went to the Liberty Bowl. They lost to Michigan by three points, Ohio State by two. They beat Army every year McCallum played except one, and they tied that time.

It’s important to the service academies to have good football teams. It’s an image matter. It ministers to institutional morale, and when underclassman McCallum broke his leg, the academy redshirted him, held him out for a year so he could play an additional season. It had never done that with an athlete before.

It’s important to have a good Navy, too. But when Ensign McCallum graduated, he was at least 20 years away from the captain’s cabin of a battlewagon or the command of a task force. He was ready for an NFL backfield right away.

When the Raiders drafted him and he was transferred out to nearby Long Beach, and when Secretary of the Navy John Lehman allowed piously as how there was nothing wrong with his returning punts for a professional football team, the horizon was alight with the big guns of the defenders of the American Way. They were out to save the Republic from the gravest threat to its institutions since the Japanese fleet sailed for Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora!

It cost the taxpayers $140,000 to make an officer and a gentleman of Ens. McCallum. He got $60 a month his first year and $120 the second, up to $360 his final year. He also got all the electrical engineering manuals he wanted. He also got all the “Square that hat!” “What’d you say, Mister, I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” the lights-out and shoe shining and “Yes, sirs!” anyone could want.

The defenders of our shores were quick to point out that other super-athletes had served their hitches without dispensation, notably Roger Staubach and Felix (Doc) Blanchard.

There was one difference: We were at war when these worthies were at their academies. Their service was deferred while they were there. They not only owed the service, they owed a lot of comrades who were taking their place on the battleground.

Would Ens. McCallum better serve his country on a mine sweeper in Newport News? Or handing out uniforms in San Diego? Chances are he’d be put at what he could do best for the United States Navy--recruiting.

He can do that better in a Raider uniform than he can in a white cap or gold braid.

No matter. Mike Royko wants to take him off his taxes. Howard Cosell wants somebody court-martialed. Capt. Queeg would probably want him in irons.

There are organizations who would want Important Naval Person McCallum to make restitution to the Navy of the 140 grand it cost to make him an officer. One of the organizations that doesn’t want this is the Navy.

One of the individuals that doesn’t want this is Ens. McCallum himself. McCallum likes the Navy and wants to stay there.

“I could buy my way out if that’s what they wanted,” he said. “It’s not what I want. Or they. I remember Joe Bellino (former Heisman Trophy winner at Navy) told me he always felt he wished he could have gotten out and had a career in pro football until one time a guy who had had a long, distinguished career in pro football came up to him and said, ‘You know, I wish I had gone to the Naval Academy instead of the pros. I’d have an education today.’ ”

Are we playing into the hands of the Russians, weakening our military Establishment by sanctioning the playing leave of this football-playing officer?

Well, the last people to think so would be the Russians. The Soviet Olympic teams, among them the world famous Soviet hockey team, are chock-full of Red Army officers. If they ever took up football, half of the team would be admirals. The other half would be spies.

Anyway, wasn’t it Wellington himself who said the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton? And MacArthur who paraphrased it: “On these fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds of future victory on more deadly fields”?

If playing on the fields of Eton can make you win the battle of Waterloo, just imagine what playing for the Raiders can make you ready for. The Russkis would send over their best generals. That’s a war college that would make the real Napoleon blanch, a crew any captain would want. Including Kidd.